• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

VMWare, can 4GB cut it?

S

soulesschild

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Feb 18, 2007
Messages
6,176
I'm going to be upgrading my main rig to i7 soon so the current rig in sig will be delegated to a VMware box. I currently have zero experience with VMware which is why I want to play around with it to learn it for future career knowledge and just to play with something.

My question is, can the rig in my sig handle running the following VMs,

WHS (full time always on for media streaming/storage/backup)
WS2k8 (not always on, mainly for testing/learning purposes)
WS2k3 (same as 2k8)
Exchange (same as 2k8)

I figure dedicating 1 WD 640AAKS as the boot drive would serve it pretty well or would you guys recommend I run a raptor? Also, would 4GB of ram make it pretty functional or do I need to spend the extra money to upgrade the ram to 8gb?
 
4GB should be ok for the load, it might be a bit slow at times. With the mix of OS's you wont get as much of a gain from memory balooning(maybe 2k3/WHS and the 2K8 boxes). Another 4GB of ram shouldn't be too expensive.
 
More RAM the better. If you're running Exchange 2007, it requires more memory than previous versions.

Which version of VMware are you going to be using?

ESXi or Server?
 
if youre planning on ESXi i would check their HCL and make sure everything is up to snuff.

that said, ESXi 3.5 on my PE2650 seems to run pretty well with the 3-4 VMs i leave running all the time on 4 gig.(dual 2.4Ghz xeons....533FSB flashback :p)

also, i cant imagine just a media streaming box NEEDING more than a gig of ram or so, 1.5 maybe. the rest i would just let the dynamic resource allocation/ballooning handle it since they wont be on 24/7
 
a WHS box just doing ts niormal stuff shouldn't need more than 550-600 MB of RAM
 
How is virtualizing WHS anyway? Has anyone done it? I've read here and there that virtualizing it requires a buncha special disk setup, yadda yadda yadda. Any comments?
 
Works very well, in my opinion. You can passthrough the hard drives you want to the WHS to use so it has direct access to the hardware, so you only have to Virtualize the primary disk. The only tricky thing about the setup is loading the SCSI driver for WHS to recognize the virtual drive for the OS. But thats only trick because you have to find, download and mount the floppy, then load the driver into WHS. It is pretty easy to do, in general, and you can get the driver right on the VMware site.
 
I used VMware in the past because of my old job. The version I was running was 6.5. Under the configuration of my virtual machines they were using "shared memory" which would allow the guest machine to appropriate the amount of memory that it needed, but when it didn't need the memory then the host machine could use it, and by virtue of the host machine, other guest machines could use it.

I don't know the technical aspects of how VMware works, but the amount of memory you need, I think, really depends on what applications you intend to run on your virtual machines. If you're just running a few LAMPS in VM then 4GB should cut it. If you're running some heavy duty apps, then consider how much memory the apps will use on the guest machines and try to accommodate that with the amount of memory you have on the host machine and what apps you will be running on the host machine, in addition to the guests. Personally I used 8 gigs, but I always had way more than necessary and the applications I was using on my guests were an oracle database on one, and a workstation on the other with office apps and virtual terminals.
 
Im currently taking a Win Server 08 class and I have to have three 08 servers running at the same time at some points. When I have all 3 going on Windows7, it takes a long time to load/resume the VMs and my available memory gets squeezed down to 100MB with 4GB. Suspending each, is a major time cruncher. I would recommend you upgrade to 6 or 8GB.
 
go ALEAST 8gb, if your computer can take the ocz 4GBx2 (AMD only) kit I would go for it and run 16gb
 
I can't imagine running a VM box on less than 8 gigs but Workstation's 7.0's pause feature is really the bomb. It's so much better than 6.5.3 and earlier versions of suspend.

If your VMs aren't tied to each other it can come in really handy.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top